"Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale"—Rudolf Virchow

May 31, 2009

Why Korea has four more H1N1 cases

Health officials said yesterday four more additional cases of H1N1, a subtype of influenza A, have been confirmed here, raising the total number of infected people to 39.

The latest cases include a 16-year-old male student who reported himself to a nearby public health center last Thursday after entering the country on Monday and showing symptoms the following day, according to officials.

Another 28-year-old male student was classified as a suspected case after showing symptoms at the airport quarantine while returning home from the United States on Saturday.

A 38-year-old woman and a U.S. national baby, who entered Korea last Monday and Tuesday respectively, were both reported to nearby public health centers last Thursday.

"The virus is infiltrating through overseas residents or students who come back home during the summer holidays season," said an official of the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

According to the Foreign Ministry, there are at least 154,600 Korean students in the United States, Canada and Japan where the disease continues to spread widely.

Some 6,000 to 6,500 travelers enter the country every day on direct flights from the United States.

This afternoon I finished a new book titled Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, by Jeff Rubin, who for 20 years was chief economist of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

Rubin argues that our present global economy is a product of cheap oil. When the price of oil spiked last year, it caused the recession—not the deadbeat homeowners in Cleveland and LA.

The recession in turn pulled oil prices down, temporarily. (Here in Vancouver, gas is already back up to about US$3.80 a gallon.)

Because of cheap oil, over 150,000 young Koreans can afford to fly to the US and spend several years absorbing a very expensive education, while 6,500 people fly in to Seoul every day from the US. That's 2,372,500 a year.

Korea, meanwhile, uses untold quantities of water and imported oil to produce the computer chips we all use to learn about H1N1 on the web. The chips pay for the oil and the students.

When oil prices spike again, and they will, it will no longer be possible to fly Korean students and Chilean strawberries to the US, or for Brits to spend a drunken weekend in the Balearic Islands, or for Australians to cruise to the Great Barrier Reef.

From an epidemiological point of view, this is good news. The vast majority of H1N1 cases around the world, from Chile to China, arrived via airliner from the United States or Canada or Mexico. North American universities and Mexican beach resorts would be much poorer without cheap jet fuel, but people around the world would be much healthier.

Yes, I know—in 1918, when the most advanced aircraft was the Sopwith Camel, Spanish flu traveled the world by train and freighter with amazing speed. But that was an earlier age of globalization, powered by cheap coal instead of cheap oil.

A worldwide economic collapse will cause far more deaths than even human-to-human H5N1 with a 60% case fatality ratio. But if we don't include economic factors in our plans for pandemic, I don't want to think about the death rates.

Comments

Health officials said yesterday four more additional cases of H1N1, a subtype of influenza A, have been confirmed here, raising the total number of infected people to 39.

The latest cases include a 16-year-old male student who reported himself to a nearby public health center last Thursday after entering the country on Monday and showing symptoms the following day, according to officials.

Another 28-year-old male student was classified as a suspected case after showing symptoms at the airport quarantine while returning home from the United States on Saturday.

A 38-year-old woman and a U.S. national baby, who entered Korea last Monday and Tuesday respectively, were both reported to nearby public health centers last Thursday.

"The virus is infiltrating through overseas residents or students who come back home during the summer holidays season," said an official of the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

According to the Foreign Ministry, there are at least 154,600 Korean students in the United States, Canada and Japan where the disease continues to spread widely.

Some 6,000 to 6,500 travelers enter the country every day on direct flights from the United States.

This afternoon I finished a new book titled Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, by Jeff Rubin, who for 20 years was chief economist of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

Rubin argues that our present global economy is a product of cheap oil. When the price of oil spiked last year, it caused the recession—not the deadbeat homeowners in Cleveland and LA.

The recession in turn pulled oil prices down, temporarily. (Here in Vancouver, gas is already back up to about US$3.80 a gallon.)

Because of cheap oil, over 150,000 young Koreans can afford to fly to the US and spend several years absorbing a very expensive education, while 6,500 people fly in to Seoul every day from the US. That's 2,372,500 a year.

Korea, meanwhile, uses untold quantities of water and imported oil to produce the computer chips we all use to learn about H1N1 on the web. The chips pay for the oil and the students.

When oil prices spike again, and they will, it will no longer be possible to fly Korean students and Chilean strawberries to the US, or for Brits to spend a drunken weekend in the Balearic Islands, or for Australians to cruise to the Great Barrier Reef.

From an epidemiological point of view, this is good news. The vast majority of H1N1 cases around the world, from Chile to China, arrived via airliner from the United States or Canada or Mexico. North American universities and Mexican beach resorts would be much poorer without cheap jet fuel, but people around the world would be much healthier.

Yes, I know—in 1918, when the most advanced aircraft was the Sopwith Camel, Spanish flu traveled the world by train and freighter with amazing speed. But that was an earlier age of globalization, powered by cheap coal instead of cheap oil.

A worldwide economic collapse will cause far more deaths than even human-to-human H5N1 with a 60% case fatality ratio. But if we don't include economic factors in our plans for pandemic, I don't want to think about the death rates.